The five-part show screening on Fox Showcase in Australia has garnered critical acclaim, ranking as the best TV show last month on IMDb and scoring a 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

But let's take a moment here to think about it.

Chernobyl: The world's deadliest place

The first archaeologist to explore Chernobyl describes the life that blossoms inside the nuclear wasteland.

This isn't a show about dragons and legends, it's a dramatic retelling of one of the world's worst nuclear disasters.

In 1986, the atomic plant's fourth reactor exploded. According to the UN, the clouds of nuclear material which spread across Europe affected 3.5 million people and contaminated 50,000 square kilometres of land.

To keep it in perspective, it unleashed about 400 times more radioactive material than the bombing of Hiroshima.

Even plant workers struggled to understand what had happened. Photo: HBOSource:Whimn

So what's with this 'dark tourism'?

Local tour operates are seeing a 30-40% increase in bookings since the show aired on HBO.

Sergiy Ivanchuk, director of SoloEast tours, told Reuters the company saw a 30% increase in tourists going to the area in May 2019 compared with the same month last year.

Yaroslav Yemelianenko, director of Chernobyl Tour offers tours of the locations depicted in the series, including the bunker where the initial decision by local officials not to evacuate after the explosion was made.

Yep, the disaster which killed 31 people instantly, forced tens of thousands to flee and killed up to 115,000 from radiation-related deaths, is now a tourist attraction.

Last April marked the 33rd anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in then-Soviet Ukraine.

Reuters reports that "the area around the plant retains the feel of a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where stray dogs roam and vegetation encroaches into windowless, abandoned buildings strewn with rubble."

Nearby Pripyat, once home to 50,000 people who worked at the plant, is now a ghost town. There's an amusement park with a merry-go-round, dodgem-car track and giant Ferris wheel that was supposed to open four days after the explosion.

Lyudmilla never left Vasily's side. Photo: HBOSource:Whimn

Tours, about $US100 ($143) per person, depart from the Kiev, the Ukraine capital, and make the 120-kilometre bus trip to Chernobyl to see the reactor. The exploded core has been covered by a 105 metre metal dome since 2017.

While Ukrainian officials have said Pripyat will uninhabitable for another 20,000 years, tour operators insist it's safe.

“Many people come here, they ask a lot of questions about the TV show, about all the events. People are getting more and more curious,” tour guide Viktoria Brozhko told Reuters.

“During the entire visit to the Chernobyl exclusion zone, you get around two microsieverts, which is equal to the amount of radiation you’d get staying at home for 24 hours”.

Visitors are given instruction to not touch items within the “exclusion zone”, the restricted space that surrounds the area of the explosion.